A TWENTIETH-CENTURY MISOGYNIST
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle or profane the leaves, their winding sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.—Charles Lamb.
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle or profane the leaves, their winding sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.—Charles Lamb.
Every Easter holidays the schoolmaster went back to Oxford. Head of a flourishing preparatory school in the north, a bachelor, absorbed in his boys, strenuous, matter-of-fact, he yet retained after some twenty years of monotonous grind a romantic affection for the dear city of his youthful dreams.
He always put up at the King’s Arms, that ancient hostel with the undulating floors, where the ale is brown and strong, and the cold beef tender and streaky. On his very first day he hied him to a solitude he loved, paid his modest threepence, and mounted to a favorite haunt of his—the picture-gallery of the Bodleian Library.
It was always empty; it almost always is empty. Undergraduates know it not; artistic and intellectual residents appear to scorn its prosaic portraits of bygone poets and college benefactors, its humble curiosities. Visitors seldom trouble themselves to mount the few extra steps leading to it from the world-famed library below. But the schoolmaster loved to wander up and down the second gallery. He loved the double archway with the traceried roof, where the statue of William, Earl of Pembroke, stands in the centre, and the two wide bay windows are filled with pale stained glass, and one has a deep, comfortable seat.
As usual, the gallery seemed deserted, and the schoolmaster let the peace of its solitude slide into his soul, till his spirit was compassed about with a great calm. He strolled slowly through the gallery, his hands, holding his straw hat, clasped behind him. He always uncovered the instant he entered the little modest door in the corner of the great quadrangle that leads to so many wonders. Presently he reached the archway where he was wont to sit and dream.
With a start of surprise he discovered that it was already tenanted.
Under the portraits of Ben Jonson and Joseph Trapp, curled up in a corner of the deep window-seat, his muddy boots reposing on the sacred oak, was a boy—a small, thin boy in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, apparently about twelve years old, who read absorbedly a popular illustrated magazine. He never looked up as the schoolmaster approached. Apparently he neither heard his footstepnor realized that the newcomer had paused to stare at him in speechless astonishment.
Amazement, accompanied by extreme annoyance, was the schoolmaster’s predominant emotion. There seemed to him something incongruous to the verge of irreverence in anyone daring to read a modern magazine under the very roof of the building that contained so much of venerable scholarship.
It is true that the boy was perfectly quiet. Beyond the turning of his page, he made no sound of any sort, and the schoolmaster found himself watching this reader with a sort of dreadful fascination. He longed that the child should reach the bottom of his page and look up. He even gave a little cough to attract his attention. But the boy seemed absolutely unconscious of either the stranger’s presence or his scrutiny, and read on unmoved, smiling occasionally at what he read.
The schoolmaster fussed to the end of the gallery, pausing at every window to look out over the roofs at the towers and spires of Oxford. Then he fussed back again along the other side, where the view consists of the grey-walled quadrangle, a veritable “haunt of ancient peace.” The peace that had enveloped him on his first entry spread her wings and fled. Irritation and curiosity had taken her place, and as he reached the archway again he stopped and looked at the motionless little figure in the window.
The boy was no longer reading.
The magazine lay on the window-seat beside him. His knees were drawn up to his chin, hisarms clasped about them, and he stared unblinkingly at the portrait of Abraham Cowley on the wall that faced him.
The schoolmaster walked round the statue of William of Pembroke till he, too, faced the boy. This time the child certainly glanced in his direction, but the glance was of the most cursory order, and wholly without interest. In an instant he had returned to his grave contemplation of the poet, and the schoolmaster might himself have been the statue of William of Pembroke for any interest he excited.
The boy was pale and thin-faced, with large, hollow eyes and a tall, wide forehead—a scholar’s forehead, as the schoolmaster, accustomed for years to the observation of boys, had already noted. But what latent scholarship was displayed in the reading of that obnoxious magazine? And what business, the schoolmaster asked himself angrily, had a boy of that age to be boxed up indoors on a fine afternoon in the Easter holidays?
The schoolmaster was a conscientious man in the pursuit of his calling. From the very first he had taught himself to look upon boys as individuals. He loved them; he whole-heartedly wished them well. They were to him of most absorbing interest; but he liked to get away from them sometimes, and nowhere had he been able to pass so completely from his ordinary life of a hundred petty duties and anxieties as in the high solitude of that deserted gallery, set in the very centre of the scenes he held most dear, now spoilt and desecrated by this young interloper with his horridmodern magazine. Why on earth did he choose to come here?
The schoolmaster could bear it no longer. “Boy,” he exclaimed, “why do you come and read here?”
Slowly the boy turned his melancholy eyes upon his questioner. “Because,” he answered, civilly enough, but without any enthusiasm, “it is generally perfectly quiet here.”
There was the faintest perceptible emphasis on the “generally,” not so much impertinent as gently reproving. Having answered, he turned his eyes again upon the chubby, smiling countenance of Abraham Cowley, and silence fell upon them like a pall.
The schoolmaster was baffled, but more curious than ever. He was quite conscious of the implied reproach in the “generally,” and he noted the absence of the courteous “sir” with which any properly constituted boy would conclude a remark made to an elder. But he could not feel that the boy had been willfully rude. He would try again. “May I ask,” he said pleasantly, “why you are so fond of looking at the portrait of Abraham Cowley?”
Again the boy shifted his gaze from the smug charms of the poet to the worn and somewhat homely features of his questioner.
“I like him cos he’s so good-tempered—in this one,” was the brief reply.
The schoolmaster came and stood beside the boy, and looked at the portrait. Above it was another,also by Kneller, but representing him as thin and severe-looking.
“They’re very different, aren’t they?” the schoolmaster remarked. “You’d hardly think they were the same man, would you?”
“I expect,” the boy said solemnly, “in the top one he’s been married.”
This startling supposition fairly took away the schoolmaster’s breath. He racked his brains to remember all he had ever heard or read of Abraham Cowley, and couldn’t for the life of him recollect whether he was married or not. It is not in the nature of a true schoolmaster to leave a youthful mind in the darkness of ignorance if he can be the bearer of a torch whose light may pierce that gloom, so he said: “I expect it was his political troubles that caused so marked a change in his appearance. Do you know anything about him?”
“No, but I like him.”
“Shall I tell you about him?”
“No, thank you,” the boy answered politely, but with firm finality.
He took up his magazine again, opened it, spread it upon his knees, and in one instant was absorbed in its pages.
The schoolmaster sat down on the window-seat and gazed alternately at the boy and at the portraits of Ben Jonson and Joseph Trapp above his head. Since he had been a little boy himself he had never felt so snubbed. He was wholly unaccustomed to be a cypher in the eyes of boys, and suddenly with devastating force there was flung upon him the conviction that he never saw a realboy at all—that the boys he saw were all carefully expurgated editions arranged to suit his sensibilities.
A wild spirit of enterprise seduced the schoolmaster. He felt himself as one who after long sailing in smooth, familiar waters suddenly sights an unknown and precipitous shore.
He had come to Oxford to get away from the boys he thought he knew. What if, at Oxford, he received real enlightenment with regard to a boy he did not know? The sunshine faded and the gallery grew dark. Outside, he heard the soft patter of a heavy April shower.
“You ought not to read in this light,” he said suddenly, “you will hurt your eyes.”
The boy looked up surprised at this fresh interruption, but he obediently closed his book: there is something almost irresistible in the commands of those accustomed to exert authority.
“Do you come here often?” asked the schoolmaster.
“Yes, whenever I’ve got threepence to get in.”
“Has no one ever told you that when you are talking to an older man it is considered polite to say ‘sir’?”
“No. I don’t know many old men, nor men at all, for the matter of that.”
“Why, Oxford is full of men.”
“That may be. I don’t know ’em. I only wish I did.”
The boy spoke bitterly and his eyes were full of gloom.
“Don’t you go to school?” this “older man” asked anxiously.
“No, I’m too delicate, so they say.”
“Who teaches you, then?”
“A guv’ness. I say, do you think weoughtto talk here?”
“I see no reason why not. This isn’t the library, there is no notice enforcing silence.”
The boy looked as if he wished there was. He sat perfectly mute, with his eyes fixed on the placid portrait over the schoolmaster’s head.
“Wouldn’t you like to come downstairs with me and see some of the curiosities in the library?” the schoolmaster suggested beguilingly.
“No, thank you.”
Really it was most difficult to make any headway with this boy. But the schoolmaster possessed to the full the necessary perseverance of his craft, so he continued his catechism:
“Do your parents live in Oxford?”
“I haven’t got any parents, they’re dead.”
“Dear me, how sad! With whom do you live, then?”
“Aunts.”
Written words can in nowise express the snappiness with which the boy ejaculated this monosyllable. The schoolmaster felt unaccountably chilled and worsted, and silence fell upon them once more.
The black cloud had passed over the Bodleian, the rain ceased, and the sun shone out again. The boy swung his feet off the window-seat, put on his cap and picked up his magazine, and withouta word of farewell, strolled nonchalantly out of the gallery, leaving the schoolmaster to exclaim when he had finally vanished, “Well, of all the curmudgeony boys it has ever been my lot to meet, there goes the most curmudgeony!”
Yet he found it difficult to dismiss the ungracious youngster from his thoughts. Next afternoon he sought the gallery again, but there was no little figure curled up in the deep window-seat. The poet Cowley smiled serenely, the gallery was deserted, dignified, reposeful as of yore: with all its mellow charm of faded coloring, that even the luminous stillness of that April afternoon could not burnish into real brightness. But the usual sense of pleasant well-being, and ordered peace, failed to enwrap the soul of the schoolmaster. Even as the day before he had found the presence of the reading figure in the window irritating and incongruous, so to-day he found its absence singularly disturbing. He walked once round the gallery, sat a few minutes looking at the portrait of Cowley and wondering what mysterious charm it held for the queer child who loved it, and so into the dear familiar irregular streets, where he scanned every boy who passed, in the hope of coming across his small acquaintance of the day before. He went every day to the gallery, but no boy was there. He almost gave up hope of ever seeing him again, but he did not forget; and when, eight days after their first meeting, he mountedto the gallery and saw the little figure crouched in the window as before, with a gaily covered magazine open on his knees, the schoolmaster’s heart beat a little faster, and he hurried forward, exclaiming: “Where have you been all these days?”
The boy started at his greeting, looked up, and a smile of recognition changed his face so absolutely that the schoolmaster felt a queer tightening in the muscles of his throat.
“I don’t get my pocket-money till a Friday,” the boy explained. “I couldn’t come before.”
“Well, now you are here, let’s have a chat together,” the schoolmaster said genially. “We both like this place, let’s tell each other the reasons why, and see if they’re the same.”
He sat down beside the boy, just out of reach of the muddy boots. The boy, his magazine still held open on his knees, surveyed his neighbor with dark, mournful eyes. Now that the smile had ceased to lighten his face, the schoolmaster was shocked at the sharpness of the thin cheekbones, the hollows and the blue shadows under the solemn eyes.
“I can’t tell you why I like it,” said the boy, “’cept p’r’aps because it’s so quiet, no one ever talks here, and there’s no women.”
“But women can come here if they like,” the schoolmaster objected.
“They neverdolike, not when I’m here,” the boy exclaimed eagerly. “I’ve been here every week for months and months and I’ve never seen one.”
“But why do you object to women?” the schoolmaster persisted. “We should be in a poor case without them, most of us.”
“Idon’t object to them,” the boy said wearily; “it’s them objects to us, and they do talk so—talk and talk and talk about their sufferings.”
“Sufferings?” the schoolmaster repeated.
“Youknow,” said the boy impatiently, “women’s sufferings and votes and things, and Parliament and injustice and that.”
“Suffrage, suffrage, you mean suffrage!” cried the schoolmaster.
“It’s all the same, that’s what they talk about, and inferiority and that. One can’t help being born a boy, can one?”
“Helpit!” exclaimed the schoolmaster. “Why, who’d be born anything else if they had their choice?”
The boy’s pale cheeks flushed. “Do you really mean that?” he asked eagerly.
“Of course I do. It’s a glorious thing to be a boy who’s going to be a man.”
“Theydon’t think so, they say it’s much better to be a girl; they’re sorry I’m a boy.”
“Oh, come,” the schoolmaster said chaffingly. “You can’t expect me to believe that. They may say so in a kind of joke, but they don’t really mean it.”
“Do you know my aunts?”
“Well, no; but I expect they are very like other ladies, who often say what they don’t mean.”
The boy gave one scornful glance in the directionof the schoolmaster, lowered his eyes to the printed page, and was instantly absorbed.
The schoolmaster felt that he was dismissed. He had been weighed in the balance, and found wanting in sympathy and insight, a mere stupid looker-on at the outside of things. Five minutes ago the boy had welcomed him. Now, it was as though the child had risen with the royal prerogative, and closed the interview. The schoolmaster sighed deeply.
The boy looked up. His eyes were the color of a still pool in a Devonshire trout stream, brown, with olive-green shadows, suggesting depths unfathomable. The schoolmaster instantly seized upon the small concession, exclaiming: “I came here every day in the hope of seeing you again, and now that you are here, you sit and read. Don’t you think it’s rather unkind?”
The boy flushed hotly, and once more the transforming smile illumined his face as he said: “You came here on purpose to see me? Why?”
“Well, you see, I’ve known a good many boys in my time, and I thought you seemed a bit lonely....”
The hungry eyes devoured him, and the schoolmaster stopped in the middle of his sentence, for, like all Englishmen, he dreaded any manifestation of feeling, and the boy looked as if he were about to cry. His fears were groundless, however, for the child only said: “How many boys have you known?”
“Rather over a thousand, I fancy. You see, ithas been my business to have to do with boys for over twenty years.”
“Over a thousand boys—and I don’t know one! How unfair things are, and beastly.”
The boy looked enviously at the grizzled man who had known so many boys; and the man looked pityingly at this boy who seemed to have been somehow cheated of all that makes youth joyous.
“How is it you have no friends of your own age?” he said presently. “Why don’t you beg your aunts to send you to school? You’d probably get stronger directly you got there, with the regular games and busy life.”
“My aunts don’t like schools. They say boys learn to be tyrants and bullies at school.”
“Oh, do they? You couldn’t have fifty tyrants in one place, or they’d be the death of one another, like the Kilkenny cats.”
“My aunts say,” the boy continued, “that I’m to be a result. I won’t be a result. It’s beastly to be a result. I’ll be a policeman when I’m grown up. Just you wait. I’ll stand outside Parliament, and if a woman comes near I’ll carry her to jail. You see if I don’t.”
The boy spoke with such vindictive bitterness that the schoolmaster was shocked.
“I have no doubt,” he said soothingly, “that your aunts have good reasons for many of their views. You cannot possibly judge of such questions for many years to come.”
“You’d judge if you heard it all day long like I do,” the boy retorted. “It’s only here I get away from it. Here in this nice quiet with that fat,contented chap smiling at me; and now you’ve been and made me talk about it, so evenhewill know. You’ve gone and spoilt my place—it’s too bad.”
The boy looked as if he was really going to cry this time, and the schoolmaster felt dreadfully guilty.
“Tell me about your parents,” he said hastily. “Do you remember them?”
“My father died before I was born, and my mother just after—she always was very unwise.”
“My dear boy, you ought not to speak about your mother like that. You shock me.”
“Well,theysay so.”
“If anyone was to say to me that my mother was unwise, I’d—I’d knock him down!” the schoolmaster exclaimed.
“P’r’aps you knew her?”
“Thank God, yes!”
“Ah, I didn’t, you see—and I don’t think I could knock Aunt Amabel down—she’s very strong.”
“Of course not, of course not,” the schoolmaster said hastily. “I never suggested such a thing for a moment. I expect you misunderstand your aunts, and it is possible that they don’t quite understand you.”
The boy said nothing. He no longer stared at Cowley’s portrait. He stared at the schoolmaster, and in his melancholy gaze was concentrated all the bitterness and disappointment of his twelve short years.
“Let us come out and walk by the Cher,” said the schoolmaster.
The boy followed him obediently, and as they turned into Catharine Street, slipped his hand into that of his new acquaintance.
“Twelve years old,” thought that worthy, “and he takes a fellow’s hand. Poor little chap!” Aloud he said: “Boys generally take each other by the arm, you know.”
Instantly his companion seized him by his, and arm in arm they sought the sheltered walk loved well by Joseph Addison.
After that they met every day in the quadrangle of the Bodleian by appointment, and together mounted to their favorite seat in the picture-gallery. The boy no longer read a magazine; instead, he asked questions—endless, anxious, exhaustive questions—as to the usual doings and habits of boys who lived with each other and were brought up by men. All his ideas on the subject were gathered from school stories, and in consequence were crude and chimerical in the extreme. It was undoubtedly a shock to him when this kindly friend of his frankly admitted that he had frequently caned boys, and that he was supposed to have “rather a heavy hand.” And the schoolmaster was still more shocked at the bitterness of soul he discovered in this queer, quiet boy. He gathered that the aunts—generally spoken of as “they”—were ladies wholly absorbed in politicsand every kind of movement for the emancipation of women, and the schoolmaster pictured them as members of the shrieking sisterhood, ill-favored and ill-dressed, oblivious of the fact that feminine political opinions do not necessarily march in elastic-sided boots. When the boy did condescend to mention one of his aunts by name it was always of “Aunt Amabel” he spoke. She appeared to be the guiding spirit of the trio, busy, strong, and energetic, spending what time she could spare from politics in the pursuit of all those games from which the unfortunate boy was debarred by lack of comrades, and the schoolmaster found himself thinking with quite unusual enthusiasm of the sister who kept house for him. At times he had regretted her exclusively domestic talents. Now he even began to share her serene conviction that women were, on the whole, so much superior to men that only the very foolish could wish to resemble them.
In the course of their long talks the schoolmaster had enlightened his companion as to what constituted, in his simple creed, the whole duty of boy; and so far as his ideals related to honor and courage and truthfulness, he found the child singularly receptive and responsive; but when he touched on the chivalry that should be shown to women, when he tried to arouse the protective instinct that is generally so deeply rooted and spontaneous in even the most rough and tumble average boy, he was met by blank incomprehension, or a veiled hostility that puzzled and depressed him. “If this,” thought he to himself, “is theresult of the feminist movement on the rising generation of men, God help the next generation of women!”
The men had come up, and the schoolmaster’s holiday was nearly ended. In two days more he would need to return to his duties in the North, to look after the cricket pitches in the playing-fields, and to see that all was shipshape for the boys’ next term. For the last time he met his sad-faced little friend in Catharine Street. This time they did not go up to the picture-gallery. It was a sunny day in late April, when Oxford seems to burgeon and blossom in a riotous ecstasy of youth and gladness. River and playing-fields were gay with lithe, flannelled figures, and everywhere the air was sweet with the scent of opening lilacs.
“We’ll go on the river this afternoon,” cried the schoolmaster when he spied the little figure waiting for him; “it’s far too fine to be boxed up indoors. I’ll take you in a Canadian canoe. You must sit very still, you know. You don’t think your aunts would mind, do you?”
“They’re in London. Aunt Amabel comes back to-night, but she’ll be off again in a day or two; she’s always going to meetings. I’m jolly glad she’s been away this week; she might have wanted to interfere——”
“I don’t think she would mind your coming out with me, or I wouldn’t take you. You must tell her all about it this evening. I’ll give you my card to show her, and you can explain how we met.”
The boy’s dark eyes were mutinous as he took the proffered card and put it in his pocket, but hesaid nothing. On the river in the bright sunshine the schoolmaster noticed how very ill he looked, and a great desire possessed this kindly soul to make things easier for the boy. The sight of the black shadows encircling the sombre eyes that should have been so bright with youth and hope decided the schoolmaster to do what he most hated doing—to interfere in another’s affairs, where he had no possible excuse or even reason for so doing.
He walked back with the boy to his home, one of the large, ugly, comfortable houses “standing in its own grounds,” that have sprung up on the outskirts of beautiful old Oxford: a house that looked excessively well-to-do and trim and neat. “Nothing of Mrs. Jellyby here,” thought the schoolmaster.
“Shan’t I see you again?” asked the boy in a husky whisper, as they reached his gate. “It’ll be awful when you’re gone.”
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” the schoolmaster said hastily. “I can’t make an arrangement now. Good-bye, my boy. God bless you!”
The boy’s wistful eyes were more than he could bear. The man turned hastily and walked away, nor once looked back at the watching figure by the gate.
Next morning he called upon Aunt Amabel about ten o’clock. The less conventional the hour, the more possible did he feel it might be to explain his errand. She was at home and would see him. The boy had evidently done his bidding. As he followed the maid from the drawing-room to thestudy, he prayed that some Pentecostal gift of tongues might be vouchsafed to him.
Aunt Amabel was seated at a large knee-hole table covered with papers. She rose as he came into the room and held out her hand. The business-like table, the litter of papers, was exactly what the schoolmaster had expected, but the lady was wholly unlike the lady of his dreams. Tall, well-dressed, good-looking, and by no means old, she made things harder for him by her welcome. “You are the gentleman who has been so good to Reginald? It is kind of you to call. I am most pleased to meet you. He is a somewhat unusual boy, is he not? We rather pride ourselves on his taste for old buildings, and things that do not generally appeal to boys.”
The schoolmaster mumbled some vague politeness and seated himself upon a chair which faced the knee-hole table. Aunt Amabel’s eyes were dark, like the boy’s, but they were bright and lively, and she turned them now upon her visitor with full inquiring gaze.
“I came,” the schoolmaster said bluntly, “to see you about your nephew. He is not well, and I think his state of health arises largely from the fact that he has no companions of his own age, nor suitable interests. Why don’t you send him to school?”
As he spoke he was perfectly conscious that this self-possessed young woman was misjudging him, and the knowledge made him even less diplomatic than usual.
“We have never considered him strong enoughfor school life. He is an unusual child of difficult temperament. He would be extremely unhappy at school.”
There was a superior finality in the lady’s tone that roused all the fighting element in the schoolmaster. “He could hardly be more unhappy than he is at present,” he said sharply. “I know that this must appear, as indeed it is, a piece of unwarrantable interference on my part, but, having become really interested in the boy, I could not reconcile it to my conscience to leave Oxford without warning you that if you persist in keeping your nephew away from the natural companionship, amusements, and employments of his age, he will wither away as surely as a plant withers when light and air are withheld from it. That boy will die.”
He shook a thick forefinger at her, and the scorn died out of her eyes. The men who most countenance the woman’s movement are seldom masterful. Aunt Amabel began to like this dictatorial man. It was a new, and not altogether disagreeable, experience to be rated.
“You have a school, haven’t you?” she asked, sweetly.
The schoolmaster’s dun-colored face crimsoned. “My dear young lady,” he answered hotly, “if you imagine that I came to see you because I was touting for another pupil, pray dismiss the idea from your mind.” This time it was Aunt Amabel who blushed. “I came because, knowing a good deal of boys, I feel sure that your nephew is delicate because he is lonely and unoccupied; he is a very boyish boy, a boy who needs the companionshipof his own kind. You have an excellent preparatory school quite near here. Try for a term—see what it does for Reginald.”
“To be quite candid,” said Aunt Amabel, “we do not care for the training, mental or moral, that boys receive at the average preparatory school.”
“Try one that’s not average,” he interrupted. “There are plenty of them, all fads and flannel shirts and girls thrown in. He won’t learn anything, but what does that matter? It’s health and youth and gladness that you want for him, and a normal point of view; at present that child’s a perfect misogynist.”
The lady started at the word, and at this critical moment her nephew came into the room. At first he did not see his friend of the Bodleian; when he did he stopped short, looking from his aunt to her visitor with puzzled, timid eyes.
“Reginald,” said Aunt Amabel, “this gentleman says you are lonely and unhappy, and that you would really like to go to school. Is this so?”
“Yes.”
The timid look faded from the boy’s eyes to be replaced by one that was almost stern, so earnest was it.
“Why have you never said anything to me about it? You have never complained.”
“What was the use?”
“But how could we know you were not happy if you never said anything?”
“He knew, without my never saying anything.” The boy pointed at the schoolmaster, who sat with downcast eyes.
“So it appears,” the lady said somewhat tartly, “although you seem to me to have said a good deal. That will do, Reginald; you may go.”
But Reginald did not go. He looked at the schoolmaster, and he looked at his aunt. He took a step forward, exclaiming earnestly: “If you will let me be like other boys, Aunt Amabel, I won’t be a policeman when I’m grown up; I’ll give it up; I’ll truly be something else.” The boy spoke as one who promises to part with some long-cherished and imperishable ideal.
“Oh, child!” exclaimed poor, puzzled Aunt Amabel, “I can’t imagine what you are talking about.Dorun away.”
“You see,” said the boy sadly to the schoolmaster, “she nevercanunderstand,” and he hastened from the room.
The schoolmaster rose. “Believe me,” he said gently, “I do not want your nephew for a pupil. I’d far rather keep him as a friend—I don’t mean to say that a master can’t be a friend to his boys, but the relationship must necessarily be a little different, and it has been a pleasant experience to come across a boy under quite new circumstances. I wouldn’t spoil it for the world.”
Aunt Amabel looked down, and the schoolmaster noticed that her eyelashes were long and very black. “I am sure you mean kindly,” she said gently, “and you may be sure I shall give every consideration to what you have said.”
When her strange visitor had gone she sat for a long time quite still in front of her table, staring with unseeing eyes at the many papers scatteredupon it. She knitted her black eyebrows and thought and thought, but apparently to no purpose, for presently she said to herself: “Whatcouldhe mean by calling that little boy a misogynist, and what on earth could the child mean about not being a policeman?”
The boy was waiting for the schoolmaster at the gate as he went out. “Well, was it any use?” he cried eagerly.
“My dear chap,” said that gentleman, “you are a little noodle. That’s what you are.”
And the boy, as he trotted by the schoolmaster’s side, found something vaguely comforting in this cryptic speech.